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Running quarry

Two ways: the compose stack, or by hand. The hand-rolled path is what this was developed against and is what the compose file encodes, so it is written down first — a run book that stays true even if the images are never built.

What the stack is

piece role state
zit the store. quarry shells out to it for every read and write (0001 §2) the .zit files themselves
quarry the forge: indexes, UI, API, sync fronting derived indexes, embedded NATS, OLTP database
notify notifications: workflows, subscribers, topics, the inbox quarry embeds SQLite
dagnats the workflow engine notify runs on: embedded NATS + JetStream + an HTTP bridge JetStream data

zit is not a runtime dependency in the ordinary sense — it is quarry's only store interface, so its version is part of quarry's behaviour. On 2026-08-16 three zit builds changed what quarry does: frames got 31% faster, a card-parsing fix changed which artifacts parse at all (and until it landed, sqlite's 794 tickets were invisible), and a new stat -R let quarry serve a bare store. Pin the pair; do not let a deploy resolve zit from whatever is on PATH.

By hand

dagnats

Runs under launchd on this machine as com.dmestas.dagnats, binding NATS on 4222 and its bridge on 8080, with data in ~/Library/Application Support/dagnats.

launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.dmestas.dagnats

A freshly-built Go binary replacing it must be ad-hoc signed or launchd kills it with OS_REASON_CODESIGNING and the service silently fails to come back:

go build -o ~/go/bin/dagnats ./cmd/dagnats
codesign -s - -f ~/go/bin/dagnats
launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.dmestas.dagnats

In standalone mode dagnats binds loopback, which is why anything talking to it shares its network namespace under compose rather than reaching it by service name.

notify

notify bootstrap -dev -db notify.db -org quarry -env dev   # prints apiKey once
notify serve -dev -db notify.db -addr 127.0.0.1:3000 \
  -nats-url nats://127.0.0.1:4222 -bridge-url http://127.0.0.1:8080
curl -s localhost:3000/readyz     # {"status":"ok","bridge":true,"db":true}

-dev derives a fixed, publicly-known master key. Outside development set NOTIFY_MASTER_KEY_HEX.

Provisioning is quarry's job, not an operator's (RFC 0011 §7). What used to be a page of curl here is now code: quarry creates a notify subscriber when an account is added, adds or removes the account from a repository's repo-<name> activity topic when it is granted, revoked, or subscribes to a thread, and creates its six workflows (quarry-mention, quarry-forum-reply, quarry-activity, quarry-landing, quarry-error, quarry-slow — defined in internal/notify/workflows.go) at startup, leaving any workflow an operator already edited untouched. quarry-landing is provisioned ahead of need: nothing triggers it yet, that lands with the pull request review surface. All of it is best-effort: a notify outage never fails the account or grant op that raised it.

quarry

quarry serve --addr 127.0.0.1:8950 --data ./data \
  --notify http://127.0.0.1:3000 --notify-key "$K" \
  --repo quarry=$HOME/quarry

--data is not optional in practice: it defaults to .quarry beside the first --repo, which writes derived state into whichever repository happens to be listed first. Always pass it.

Gates are open until they are closed, and closing them is two separate credentials on purpose — accounts are the forge identity (argon2id), the sync secret is the RFC §6.3 value the protocol fixes:

quarry account add --user you --admin --data ./data   # closes web/API writes
quarry user add --repo name=$HOME/quarry --user you --data ./data   # closes push

The account gate is global: the first account closes writes on every repository in the fleet, not just one.

The attention stream and HTTP/2

Signed-in pages open one Server-Sent Events connection for the attention stream — the inbox badge and the count in the tab title (RFC 0011 §5). In-page banners are off by default and are turned on per account on /inbox ("In-page banners"), which is also where desktop notifications are opted into; with both off the stream still moves the badge and the title, and nothing ever covers the page being read. On plain HTTP/1.1 a browser allows six connections per origin, and a repository page already spends one or two of them on the chat and timeline streams. So the default opens the attention stream on repository pages only: a stream on every page would compete with the page it sits on for the same six slots, and the symptom is a page that stalls halfway through loading rather than an error anybody can read.

With HTTP/2 in front there is no such limit — one connection carries every stream — so the whole forge can hold it open:

quarry serve ... --attention-everywhere

Use it when quarry is behind TLS termination that negotiates h2, or behind a proxy speaking h2c to a browser. quarry serves plain HTTP/1.1 itself, so the flag is a statement about what is IN FRONT of it and quarry cannot check it: turned on without h2, it is the six-connection problem on every page.

Nothing else changes. Without the stream a page still renders its own state and the inbox badge is fetched once after load, which is the Principle 3 behaviour every one of these surfaces keeps.

The activity robot

A repository can have its timeline talk in its chat channel (RFC 0011 §10): settings → Activity robot, in the same event-pattern syntax webhooks take (*, a noun like checkin, or an exact kind like landing.accepted). Empty turns it off. Robot lines never count as unread and never mention anybody.

Fleet admin

/fleet is the operator page — every store's ingest health, and the upstreams it mirrors. It is site admin only: admin on one repository is not enough, because the page reports operational detail across the whole fleet and can force writes into any of it.

Health is per-process. Total and Fallbacks count what THIS server has ingested since it started, so a restart with a warm index reports zero of both however much the store holds. The parse-fallback number worth looking at is the one a quarry reindex produces.

Mirroring

A mirrored store tracks an upstream: quarry pulls, and never pushes.

curl -u you:pw -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/mirrors \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"repo":"fossil","url":"https://fossil-scm.org/home","every":3600}'

every is seconds and is floored at 60 — these upstreams are other people's servers, and the floor is a courtesy the configuration surface cannot opt out of. --mirror-tick (default 1m) is how often due-ness is evaluated, not how often anything is pulled.

Pulls take the store's single-writer lease, so mirroring is safe with more than one node serving the same store. A pull that brings nothing new does not trigger a re-index and is not logged; almost every one is quiet, and a line per store per interval buries the ones that matter.

Two limits worth knowing before you rely on it:

With compose

export NOTIFY_SRC=../notify           # a notify checkout; it builds dagnats too
export ZIT_REF=<commit>               # pin the store implementation
docker compose up --build

Then bootstrap notify once (docker compose run --rm notify bootstrap …), put the key in QUARRY_NOTIFY_KEY, and create the workflows and topics as above.

docker run <image> cat /etc/quarry-build reports which quarry and which zit an image carries, without starting it.

Unverified. Dockerfile and compose.yml have not been built — no container runtime is installed on the development machine. The two build recipes inside them are verified natively: zit compiles from a clean clone of the GitHub mirror with zig build --release=fast, and quarry builds fully static with CGO_ENABLED=0 (its SQLite is WASM-based and Pikchr runs on wazero, so nothing needs a C toolchain). What remains untested is the image assembly and the compose wiring.

Ports

port what
4222 dagnats NATS
8080 dagnats HTTP bridge (and its console — unauthenticated, keep it on loopback)
3000 notify API
8950 quarry

quarry's own embedded NATS binds nothing (DontListen), so it never collides.